


The Science of Colour

by PaulKeatingOfficial



Category: Smallville
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Character Study, Colour based soulmate au, Drabble, F/M, Very Lionel-heavy, and that's just as good tbh, but i do know a lot about sounding pretentious, i don't know anything about science
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-21
Updated: 2018-08-21
Packaged: 2019-06-30 12:46:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,627
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15751935
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PaulKeatingOfficial/pseuds/PaulKeatingOfficial
Summary: Before you meet your soulmate, everything in your world is grey. Literally. When you meet that one person who completes your being, your world begins to colour. Those are the rules of the world Lionel Luthor inhabits, but since when does Lionel Luthor accept any rule at face value.A sappy character piece masquerading as a soulmate au.





	The Science of Colour

The moment you lay eyes on your soulmate, the world around you changes. Your life bursts into glorious colour and you spend every last waking moment in marital bliss and mutual adoration with the one person who can make your life complete, until the both of you die wrapped in each others arms in perfect existential contentment.

Or, at least, that was the rhetoric that Lionel had been subjected to all his life. The constant, spouting promise clung to only by the naive, the stupid and the arrogant. Lionel was only one of those things, so you could be certain that he’d never fallen sway to these simplistic, sugar-coated, platitudes.

As a person born naturally suspicious and scientifically minded, Lionel had questioned from the very beginning how people could possibly believe there was one soulmate for everybody. Simply by reckoning in the sheer number of people on the earth, median mortality rates and the passage of time, Lionel figured that the probability of ever accidentally stumbling across your alleged soulmate had to be astronomical.

Then, if you did manage to bridge that gap and actually discover them, there was every chance that they would already be in a relationship, that they would be too old to begin a new romance, that after you met them they would walk into traffic and die the next day. What then, does it matter if you were soulmates, if they’re already deceased? How did Lionel know that his soulmate hadn’t been Empress Theodora, or Niccolò Machiavelli? Figures from history with whom Lionel felt far more kinship and a, frankly, more understandable connection than he did with his contemporaries in Suicide Slums.

If you were to believe the propaganda they had concocted to counter this argument, there was no doubt your soulmate existed at the same time as you did, because it was fate that destined you two to be joined. Which of course brought Lionel another set of objections and questions as to what this meant for the prospect of free will, and even the existence of an all-powerful deity controlling the lives of people on Earth. Lionel had read the Bible and he was pretty certain of his reading of it (as he was certain of his readings in all things), so he was fairly confident that He wouldn’t be spending His omnipotence on shacking up each individual humans with their perfect match.

Lionel wasn’t even convinced that the ‘perfect match’ had anything to do with romantic love either. He’d seen couples never experience the discovery of colour and still manage to somehow live with happy marriages. As well as people who met and decided they were meant to be together based on nothing but their newfound ability to see colour, destroying their established lives in the process. For Lionel, there was nothing to suggest that love had anything to do with your supposed soulmate and visa versa.

His skeptical position was shaken when he’d met Lillian. A meeting that couldn’t have been more polished than if it had been written for them. In the midst of a busy social event, bustling with important people, having important conversations but living out unimportant lives, Lionel’s gaze found her’s across the room. The noise around them quietened and the people melted away as Lionel walked towards her, all the while staring into her blue eyes.

Blue

His heart swooped upwards in his chest, beating faster and harder than he’d thought possible as greys and blacks melted into greens, blues and dazzling violets. When he held Lillian’s hand he’d known that she’d seen it too, and that was almost enough to make Lionel a believer.

Soon enough, of course, Lionel learned that he hadn’t, in fact, gained access to the entirety of the colour spectrum that others experienced. He’d felt a heady mix of disappointment and indignation that inspired a fervently renewed interest in his favourite pet subject, the impossibility of predestined, perfect soulmates. Along with Lionel’s natural tendency towards cynicism and science, he had later developed an irrepressibly obsessive and entitled disposition. When things began to sour in his and Lillian’s relationship, Lionel couldn’t help but feel cheated by their half-soulmate status and blamed most of their issues on that fact, rather than his own oppressive behaviour and Lillian’s ensuing resentment.

But, when Lillian died, for a long while Lionel forgot to rant about how impossible it all was, forget to rail against the incomplete nature of ‘soulmate studies’. He was too preoccupied with trying not to open his eyes. Everywhere he looked were blues, greens and violets that stamped Lillian’s name on the world wherever he saw them.

In the years that came after, Lionel locked away that emotional weakness, like he did all his others. He buried it inside himself and allowed his skepticism to return. His obsession, however, didn’t resurface until he returned to the town of Smallville; an unobtrusive, unimpressive, unremarkable town a few hours out from Metropolis. The most interesting things about it, Lionel told himself, were the meteor shower that had hit in the late eighties and the subsequent drop in land value that allowed to Lionel to acquire huge swathes of farmland for almost nothing.

Although he had a factory there, Lionel hadn’t felt the need to return personally for years. After all, he had competent factory managers, and the town’s inhabitants regarded him personally with a certain, justified frostiness. Yet, something about Smallville had always played at the fringes of his mind. It drew him back, over a decade later, sure, but slowly, inevitably it drew him back. At first, he had thought it was the deposits of meteor rock that had captured his attention, it was a wholly unique substance and it incredible properties had propelled his research to a state that was decades ahead of his competitors. But there was an emotion that Lionel hadn’t explored, because there was nothing that Lionel avoided more stringently than self-reflection, that suffused his memories of the place.

He couldn’t conjure it up consciously but his memory, and his dreams, were tinged with something he couldn’t put into words. Unbidden, his mind would conjure up the day of the meteor shower, jostling along the country road in Jonathan Kent’s pickup, cradling Lex in his arms, frozen with terror as the last few strands of Lex’s singed and matted hair fall away. Hair of a colour Lionel couldn’t understand, couldn’t even picture when he was awake.

He would think of the time, a week or so later, delivering adoption papers to the Kent farm, when he had sat in the back seat of his limousine, about to pull back out onto the road when he had stopped his driver for just a moment. He had sat, staring at Jonathan and his wife, silhouetted against the entrance to their farmhouse, trepidatious but so excited, against the backdrop of blue sky and the sweeping expanse of green farmland. They dropped to their knees to embrace their newly adopted son and, for just a moment, Lionel’s vision altered and every beam of wood, every painted shutter, the very dirt on the ground revealed themselves as they truly were.

The moment passed as quickly as it had come, and Lionel ordered his car back to Metropolis immediately. For the life of him, he couldn’t see again the colour his heart knew he had experienced. He had himself checked. Eye tests, brain scans, anything that could tell him what had happened. Nothing turned up. He had no explanation for this temporary flash of life but those that complicated his established philosophies. He had to rationalise it, to tell himself that the trauma of the week had weakened his mind temporarily, affected his carefully curated emotional state. He explained it as imaginary, a delusion, that had in reality never happened. He was convincing, and in time had fooled even himself into believing it.

That had been years before he’d sent Lex to Smallville. But when he did, the extraordinary happened. Lex had found himself in trouble almost immediately, something Lionel both intimately understood and disapproved of wholeheartedly. Recklessly, he drove his car off a bridge and had to be rescued. His rescuer? None other than the child Lionel had signed over to the Kent’s all those years ago; a coincidence that piqued Lionel’s interest immediately.

Not only that, but according to Lionel’s eyes and ears in Lex’s personnel, that was the day Lex’s world burst into colour.Even if Lionel had not been spying on him, he would have suspected what had happened from how obsessed Lex became with the boy. Lex’s interest in discovering the cause of the phenomenon was the only one that exceeded Lionel’s own. As expected, Lex ran every test imaginable on himself. Eye scans, brain scans, psychological and physiological results all showed the same thing, Lex had stumbled upon the person who had triggered his colour response. The person that folklore, popular culture and the media would have you believe is your other half, the completion of your soul and the realisation of your life’s true destiny.

Lex had reason to be concerned about this destiny, because unlike in most cases, the revelation was actually causing Lex pain. In its early stages, everywhere Lex looked the colours were too vibrant, the hues too bright, every scrap of light painfully reflecting off his retinas. It calmed down within a few weeks, but his brain scans showed the abnormality of the situation. And, as it turned out, during the course of Lionel’s parallel investigation into the Kent boy, the moment had not been rendered nearly so special for Clark. Clark, he was surprised to find, had been seeing in colour for as long as anyone could remember, unable to recall a person, place or time that may have triggered it. There was something different about the situation between Lex and Clark, and it infuriated Lionel that he didn’t understand it.

Smallville was also exerting its own force over Lionel, and despite his proclivity for city-living he found that he continued to increase his visits to Smallville, practically taking up residence there by the end of Lex’s first year running the plant. Lionel’s office in Metropolis began to gather dust as he made the town his own, engineering meetings with the mysterious Clark Kent, searching in him for an answer to the questions he had been asking his whole life. What he found instead was a tiresomely well-mannered and well-intentioned young man.

During the course of his stay, Lionel experienced again those strange flashes that he had been subjected to years before. The unsettling sensation of the world blurring and melting into colour for what must have been half a second before returning to the cool blue palette he was used to. The most prominent of these was during the day the Smallville plant had shut down with both Clark and his son inside. He had hoped that day to speak with Clark, to measure him against his expectations but Instead he found his heir, trapped inside a building he owned, with no way for Lionel to reach him. Lionel had taken off his glasses, rubbed his brow and wiped his tired eyes. When he opened them again, he was stunned by the blinking alarm on the building’s roof, and the sunlight glinting off its walls.

Then it was gone. His emotions back in careful check, Lionel turned to the Kents, calm and detached, explaining that no-one would be able to enter. The boys would have to find their own way out or not at all.

There were other strange moments that year that led Lionel to re-evaluate his stance on Smallville’s relative irrelevance somewhat, but it was that next year that undid him completely. Recovering from his tornado inflicted injuries left Lionel with everything but his eyesight in perfect working order. He would never forget that sinking feeling, of waking up in the hospital room and instead of being confronted with grey, green or blue, he saw nothing but an unmoving, unchanging, all-encompassing black.

There was no question of going back to Metropolis in his condition. He wasn’t going to allow someone he didn’t even know to fuss or care for him. Someone whom he would always suspect was taking advantage of his condition to rifle through his property and meddle in his life. No. He would stay in Smallville with the one man he was sure would do all those things. At least Lex wouldn’t attempt to sugarcoat his behaviour with platitudes and flattery. Lex was also the person with the most to gain from Lionel’s eventual fall, and Lionel was a keen believer in the old proverb; keep your friends close, your enemies closer and your family within arm’s length at all times.

If Lex was going to betray him, he was going to have to do it under Lionel’s nose, and if he could do that, he deserved to.

But it was during his time at the mansion that Lionel had begun to feel the first degree of helplessness. He had gone blind, yet the world had kept turning. Luthorcorp stock fell and Lex righted the ship. He didn’t do it as well as Lionel would have, but he did it all the same. Nothing collapsed, no-one revolted and Lionel realised that if his injuries had been more serious and he had been unable to return to work at all, that Luthorcorp may have been just fine. It was the most devastating realisation of his life.

Lionel was sitting outside, in the flower garden, when she found him. He was listening to the stock report from the Daily Planet, combing the paper with his e-reader and thinking that his gambit in staying away from the office may have been aesthetically useless if it looked like Lex’s takeover had caused stock to rise again when it did. She didn’t ask for anything. She didn’t expect anything. She simply walked over to him and sat down. She chose to sit next to him, take the paper from his hands and read it to him. The gentleness of her skin brushing his was an event of such magnitude that Lionel could barely conceptualise. Then, Martha Kent took what was already an awe-inspiring act of selflessness and turned it into a gift Lionel could never repay.

Martha saw his uncertainty in his gambit, and articulated perfectly the smokescreen he was attempting to draw over it all. She saw his plan and through it she saw him. What’s more she saw that it would work. By doing so, she let Lionel know that although Lex could move the pieces around, he was still the mastermind. And at least one person other than himself could see it. Martha was the only person in a decade to understand intimately what he was doing with Lionel having to spell it out for them. He purposefully kept his actions inscrutable and his motives shrouded in mystery but Martha Kent, with a few simple kindnesses and a logical leap, had seen him.

Lionel fell in love with Martha about ten seconds after she sat down on the bench next to him that day. What Lionel didn’t know was that at the time, Martha Kent was experiencing an epiphany of her own. The beautiful garden, which had already been gorgeous, bursting with colour and light, seemed to transcend itself. When Lionel complimented her acute business sense, told her she was meant for bigger things, had smiled at her in awe and earnest thanks, her world seemed to literally get brighter. Her eyes darted away from his face, embarrassed only to see, in a nearby flower bush, hues of pinks and greens that for the life of her she knew she’d never seen before.

Unlike Lionel, Martha had never been cynical about the prospect of a soulmate. And her open-mindedness was rewarded with an experience almost perfectly in-line with that of the storybooks, the poems, and the cheesy romantic comedies always playing on prime time. She had known the truth of it since the moment she had asked a sandy haired boy, wearing blue denim, for his notes and he had handed them straight over. Naturally then, finding herself transfixed by the slender threads of brown, grey and gold glinting in Lionel’s beard was a shock to her system. And, when Lionel offered her a job a few short minutes later, Martha thought it only the second strangest thing to have happened that morning.

She said yes without thinking of the repercussions. All she knew was that something had just made her life more complicated, and that she didn’t quite understand it yet. Which would in fact turn out to be an accurate summary of most of her interactions with Lionel Luthor. As with everything Martha didn’t understand, she set out to look at it from every perspective she could. What she deduced from that, was that she didn’t really want to follow this revelation through to its conclusion.

The world hadn’t ended, nothing had upturned and Martha thought that, what information there was, would be better kept with her and her alone. She didn’t tell Jonathan, and she didn’t tell Lionel. The man was blind, after all, he couldn’t possibly have experienced what she had. She was right, of course. Lionel wasn’t experiencing the same concerning, but ultimately level-headed, response she was. He was going through something far more dramatic.

As his eyesight slowly healed, Lionel could barely contain his anticipation at seeing Martha’s face. He knew her blue eyes, remembered them from when they had met before. They were soft and kind, and Lionel longed to have her look at him with the gentleness he had seen her give to others. The moment Lionel regained his sight, he knew the world had changed. He knew that the very fabric of reality and the rules that bound this earth together, the very rules he had spent his life dedicated to mastering, had unravelled themselves and woven back into an existence more beautiful than Lionel was sure anyone before him had ever conceived of.

Then Martha walked through the door and all Lionel could do was freeze as his eyes travelled over her red hair.

Red.

Her lips too. Lionel could hardly take his eyes off her red lips, watching them as they formed her words, daintily scolding him for whichever ethical transgression he’d committed since they last saw each other. Lionel nodded as he noticed the pink of her cheeks, the brown in her coat, the gold glint of her delicate brooch. When Martha Kent walked into that room, all of Lionel’s very reasonable ideas about time, statistics and probability were nowhere to be found. In that moment he was on the side of every love struck fool who ever made a film insisting on the truth of a perfect soulmate. He was in the company of the poets who had spent centuries espousing the virtues of every colour, every shade, every hue.

It all happened in that moment, and Lionel did not react. He was still, as far as anyone else was concerned, blind. So Martha smiled and walked to her desk as Lionel had the single most profound experience of his life in complete silence.

Of course, Lionel had to check. Had to see whether perhaps Martha had experienced the same, whether she understood what had happened to him. But Martha was married, and she loved her husband, and she didn’t want him. Being married had never stopped Lionel before, so it only served to show how deeply he had been affected, that this time, something was different. Lionel didn’t tell her. He kept his experience to himself, knowing without articulating it to himself, that if he ever revealed something so intimate, only to be rejected, he would never recover.

There was no question of him disappearing from her life now, if there ever was. That had been inevitable from the moment Martha had voiced her opinion over the Daily Planet’s financial section. And so time went on, neither one revealing to the other what they had seen, but finding themselves drawn back together time and again. No matter the roadblocks, or the issues that broke them apart, it was only a matter of time before they were back in each other’s company. Keeping their secrets hidden. Wondering, all the while, whether if perhaps, the feelings were returned, but neither brave or willing enough to tolerate the prospect that they weren’t.

It wasn’t until years later, after Smallville had gone through more upheavals than anyone could have imagined, and complications stacked upon complications, turning their lives into a tangled web that would likely never unravel, that things changed. Emotions running high, their relationship reached a tipping point and Martha could not help but confess, voice barely more than a whisper, that there was something undeniable between them.

They told each other the truth and Lionel’s happiness almost, but not quite, masked the vindication he felt at proving the speculations he had always held. That the soulmate was not a one-time phenomenon, and that the creators of pop-culture (as Lionel had often suspected) had no idea what they were talking about, because life was infinitely more complex than they would have you believe. Lionel considered, briefly, publishing his renewed theorems in an academic journal but, looking around himself, and being in Martha’s presence, he realised that it just didn’t matter. Also, he would wait until he had discovered a way for it to turn into a profitable venture first.

For Lionel, and for Martha, love was not once in a lifetime, but that didn’t mean anything when, in glorious colour, the second half of their lives began.


End file.
